One Virtuoso Physician

By

Ralph Gardner Jr.

Updated Oct. 27, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

John Cahill is one of the few doctors left who makes house calls. No, he won't come to your house; the one he cares for is the New York Philharmonic. Dr. Cahill, senior attending physician in infectious diseases and emergency medicine at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, serves as the orchestra's in-house physician, treating everything from violinists' stiff necks to an epidemic of food poisoning that occurred while the orchestra was on tour several years ago.

ENLARGE

Dr. John Cahill works at the Philharmonic.
Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal

One morning last week, Dr. Cahill, 43, was making last-minute preparations for his 2:30 p.m. flight to Belgrade, the first stop on the Philharmonic's current 14-day tour that will also include Ljubljana, Warsaw, Hamburg, Paris and Luxembourg.

Dr. Cahill doesn't travel with a medicine bag; he travels with a medicine trunk. "It's filled with medications to treat almost every common ailment including infections, bad colds, eye problems," he said. "I can cast things. Repair lacerations. We also travel with a defibrillator."

Fortunately, it's never been needed, perhaps because world-class musicians tend to be a reasonably healthy subculture. "You have to be a fairly organized and structured person to be a professional musician," said Dr. Cahill, who studied the violin in high school with Julliard's
Dorothy DeLay,
but who confessed he's been too insecure to accept invitations to sit in with members of the orchestra. "Most of these people still practice every day. With that often comes a healthy lifestyle."

When the Philharmonic is on tour, Dr. Cahill said he always has his own dressing room backstage. "I have office hours, especially during intermission when people will come in," he said, "They might have an ache in their wrist or a bout of travel diarrhea. It's rare, but sometimes I'll have to take someone to the hospital. I know all their medical histories."

He doesn't have a permanent office at Lincoln Center, though he said he tries to attend at least one performance a week.

As challenging and at times stressful as a cut to a violinist's hand or a food-poisoning outbreak that incapacitates 25% of the orchestra (that happened in Kentucky, of all places, Dr. Cahill among the victims) can be, the Philharmonic and St. Luke's constitute only part of his practice.

He also serves as a doctor at the Ortum Missionary Hospital, a 100-bed facility in a remote part of northeastern Kenya, traveling there several times a year. His African patients couldn't be more different than the Philharmonic's string section.

"Most people don't seek medical care unless they're gravely ill" and only after traditional healers have failed them, Dr. Cahill explained, often walking days to reach the hospital. "The whole family comes and will actually live there while the patient is being treated."

ENLARGE

The hospital in Kenya where Dr. John Cahill works.
John Cahill

He said that's actually helpful, because it allows the hospital to treat the family for diseases such as malaria and parasitic infections, and to educate them about proper medical care. "One of the leading causes of death are complications during pregnancy and childbirth," he said. "We can screen all the mothers for HIV and can give a drug that decreases the transmission of HIV to the newborn child. We've seen a significant drop in infant mortality rates."

"I've seen elephant injuries," he went on. "Lion attacks. Crocodile bites are not uncommon. Crocodiles, when they bite you, their teeth fall out. When you treat crocodile bites you have to make sure there's no teeth left."

Snakebites are also a problem, the doctor differentiating between those whose venom causes paralysis, such as spitting cobras, and vipers whose bites kill the surrounding tissue. "We do a fair amount of skin grafts," he explained, adding that even at the hospital, "you shine a light in a cupboard before you put a hand in it."

Before he had his own family, Dr. Cahill spent three months at a time in Africa. Now living in Westchester with his wife and two children, ages 5 and 3, he travels to Ortum 10 days at a time, several times a year. The contrast between his two worlds couldn't be starker.

"If one of them cuts his finger they're going to be very upset and distraught," he said of the Philharmonic's musicians. "They want to be reassured, since it's their livelihood. Whereas I can have people in Africa that have fingers missing and they don't think anything of it. The expectation of the level of health care is very different."

Being the New York Philharmonic's physician is something of a Cahill family tradition. John's uncle Kevin served as the orchestra's doctor during
Leonard Bernstein's
tenure as conductor.

Dr. Cahill said one of the pleasures of the job is that he's become friends with orchestra members, as well as Philharmonic soloists such as pianist
Emanuel Ax
and his wife Yoko, also a pianist, who created the Ortum Girls Initiative in collaboration with the Center for Global Collaboration and Health, a foundation Dr. Cahill started. The Initiative sponsors girls for four years of secondary education, as the Kenyan government covers only children's primary-school education.

Dr. Cahill described his interest in educating young women as somewhat "selfish."

"We do know the higher the level of education, the better a population's health," he said, adding that women are the linchpin in that effort, and that by educating them, you "not only improve the individual but the community."

The Axes and Dr. Cahill solidified their friendship when Ms. Ax swallowed a fish bone while the Philharmonic was on tour in Hanoi with her husband a year ago. In the end, it wasn't Dr. Cahill but advice Ms. Ax received from the orchestra's principal oboist, Liang Wang, who shared a traditional Chinese remedy—drinking balsamic vinegar—that saved her a trip to the hospital.

"It will help dissolve the fishbone," said Ms. Ax, who drank a full cup of vinegar. "I had a terrible stomach ache," but the treatment worked.

Dr. Cahill said that when the orchestra goes on tour these days, "I always carry a half-gallon of vinegar."

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